Application programs deal with several different types of resources, for example images, fonts, pages to which the application may navigate, or files (e.g., XML-based) that are used as data sources within the application. These resources may be loaded from any of several possible locations.
At present, developers write custom mechanisms for retrieving resources from each of these locations. Further, developers often need to refer to an application resource by specifying a full path to that resource. This complicates programming models, and results in poor application portability.